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The Enlightenment of Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia Author(S): Gary Marker Source: Slavic Review, Vol

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The Enlightenment of Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia Author(S): Gary Marker Source: Slavic Review, Vol The Enlightenment of Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia Author(s): Gary Marker Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 369-390 Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697057 Accessed: 02-02-2016 17:42 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697057?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Enlightenmentof Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia GaryMarker In recent years the historiographyof Catherinian Russia has made small but perceptible strides toward engendering or at least toward discussing women as historical subjects outside the specific context of the household. Beginning withBrenda Meehan's 1976 article "Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule," most attention has focused, appropriately,on fe- male rule and the question of how a patriarchal culture accommodated it- self to the preponderance of female rulers in the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century.' In the interim,several scholars have had occasion to expand upon this theme, and yet most would agree that much remains to be explored on this topic.2 Meehan subsequently opened up a second front by examining con- vents and women's religious communities, arguing in essence that for many displaced nuns and lay women these communities constituted an al- ternative to domesticity,a way of achieving independence by serving God while in the exclusive company of other women.3 Adele Lindenmeyr's book on institutionsof charityin imperial Russia makes a similar point: in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the nexus of charityand reli- gious self-sacrificeconstituted virtually the only extra-domestic outlet (ex- 1. Brenda Meehan-Waters,"Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule," RussianReview 34 (July1976): 293-307. 2. See, forexample, David Griffiths,"Catherine II and the Problemof Female Sover- eignty"(paper, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Honolulu, No- vember1993); BarbaraT. Norton,"Historical Assessments of Russia'sEighteenth-Century Female Monarchs"(paper presentedat the conference"New Understandings of the Expe- rience of Women,"Moscow, May 1994); Jehanne M. Gheith,"Introduction" to KyrilFitz- lyon,trans. and ed., TheMemoirs of Princess Dashkova (Durham, 1995), 8-13; A. I. Iukht, EkaterinaII i eeokruzhenie (Moscow, 1996), esp. 118-278; RichardWortman, "The Russian Empressas Mother,"in David Ransel,ed., TheFamily in ImperialRussia: New Lines of Histor- ical Research(Urbana, 1978), 61- 63; Karen Rasmussen,"Catherine II and the Image of PeterI," SlavicReview 37, no. 1 (March 1978): 51- 69; JamesCracraft, "Great Catherine," SlavicReview52, no. 1 (Spring1993): 115;JohnT. Alexander,Catherine the Great, Lifeand Leg- end (New York,1989), 62- 65 and elsewhere.See, also, LindseyHughes, "Peterthe Great's Two Weddings:Changing Images ofWomen in a TransitionalAge," in RosalindMarsh, ed., Womenin Russia and Ukraine(Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 31-41 and, fora somewhatmore popularnarrative, Evgenii Anisimov, Zhenshchiny na rossiiskomprestole(St. Petersburg, 1997), 277-398. 3. Brenda Meehan, HolyWomen of Russia (San Francisco,1993); Meehan, "To Save Oneself:Russian Peasant Women and the Developmentof ReligiousCommunities in Pre- revolutionaryRussia," in BeatriceFarnsworth and LynneViola, eds.,Russian Peasant Women (New York,1992), 121-33; Meehan, "Popular Piety,Local Initiativeand the Foundingof Women'sReligious Communities in Russia, 1764-1907," St. Vladimir'sTheological Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1986): 117- 42. SlavicReview 59, no. 2 (Summer2000) This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 370 Slavic Review cept for singular figures such as Ekaterina Dashkova) to social or public service open to women.4 Michelle Marrese's recent dissertation has developed a third line of study, by examining women in the marketplace, specifically as buyers, sellers, and owners of property.5Much like Valerie Kivelson's and Robin Bisha's works on earlier periods, Marrese's dissertation concluded that noble women bought and sold propertywith increased frequency, often acting as the representative signatory for the household even when an adult male was available.6 This essay takes a highly microscopic approach to the question of women in public in Catherine's time. It offersa close reading of the mem- oir and diary ofjust one woman, Anna Evdokimovna Labzina, a provincial noblewoman who rose to considerable prominence in St. Petersburg's Ma- sonic milieu during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It explores how she depicted her life amid prominent men of letters and whether her renderings support or challenge the prevailing scholarly im- age of a largely unitaryRussian Enlightenment. More specifically,this pa- per inquires into how Labzina imagined a feminine presence, in general and for herself,within Enlightenment's realms of sociability,public activ- ity,and civic virtue. "The Enlightenment" survivesas one of the most enduring of histori- cal categories, denoting, in Andrzej Walicki's phraseology, "an ideology that stood for a rationalist universalism,that was antifeudal and freethink- ing by definition,and that set out to liberate the individual ... by using ar- guments based on 'reason' and 'human nature,' which were thought to be common to all men and therefore superior to ... superstitions sanctified by custom."7 More recent scholars, however, deeply affected by Michel Foucault's antirationalism and skepticism, have challenged this comfort- able model, imagining instead a more pluralist, ambiguous Enlighten- ment, characterized as disciplinaryand repressive, the so-called dark side of formal egalitarianism and the rule of law.8 This general challenge to a unitary Enlightenment soon generated inquiry into the engendering of reason and law, specifically around the problem of "women and the public sphere," as Joan Landes termed it in her important monograph of the same name.9 Embedded in this discus- 4. Adele Lindenmeyr,Poverty Is Nota Vice:Charity, Society, and theState in ImperialRus- sia (Princeton,1996). 5. Michelle Lamarche Marrese,"A Woman'sKingdom: Women and the Control of Propertyin Russia,1700-1861" (Ph.D. diss.,Northwestern University, 1995). 6. Robin Bisha, "The Promiseof Patriarchy:Marriage in Eighteenth-CenturyRussia" (Ph.D. diss.,Indiana University,1993); ValerieA. Kivelson,"The Effectsof PartibleInheri- tance:Gentry Families and the Statein Muscovy,"Russian Review 53 (April1994): 197-212. 7. AndrzejWalicki, A Historyof Russian Thought from theEnlightenment toMarxism (Stan- ford,1979), 35. 8. JanGoldstein, "Framing Discipline with Law: Problemsand Promisesof theLiberal State,"American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April1993): 366- 67. 9. Joan B. Landes, Womenand thePublic Sphere in theAge of theFrench Revolution (Ithaca, 1988). This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Enlightenmentof Anna Labzina 371 sion has been a controversyover the verymeaning of "public sphere": is it a structure,as Jiirgen Habermas would have it, a "theater for debating," an "arena in which private persons deliberated about public matters"?10 Or, is "public" an intertextualcategory, less a concrete space than a claim made forprivileging certain discourses as being participatoryand freefrom the constraintsof the state and domesticity?By extension, does "feminine presence" mean the specific participation of women, as Landes or Mary Ryan maintain, or does it suggest something textual, that is, a category within "the public" that is deemed somehow "feminine"?" I To date there have been ratherfew attempts to transpose these debates to eighteenth-centuryRussia; most of the literatureholds firmin the belief that the Russian Enlightenment was simpler and more transparent,an un- complicated blend of officialutilitarianism and individualist sentimental- ity.In Nicholas Riasanovsky'swords, "Russian government and society fol- lowed the path of the Enlightenment in a remarkably united, conscious, and in many ways successful manner."'2 Even Marc Raeff,who in recent years has come to stressthe affectivequality of Russian thought, in the end sees these various strainsfitting into a coherent whole. "Russia's educated elite . found themselves closer to the German Aujkldrungthan to the French Lumieres,and we should speak of an 'enlightenment of the heart' as their most characteristic ingredient. This gave a more
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